Death's Sweet Song (5 page)

But it all came back to Paula, eventually. Oh, I had been drunk on heady wine, all right, and only a man with a hangover can know the terrible thirst for more that comes the day after. Paula had known. Knowing that I never intended to keep my promise to her, she had smiled.

She had known better.

It's possible to hate and love at the same time, they say, but I did not hate Paula. Where there had been stale existence, Paula had brought excitement. She had given me something to fight for—herself. Let's face it, Hooper, it's not only the ten thousand dollars that fascinates you— it's that blonde as well, and you know it.

Her husband? I hardly thought of him. What was necessary I would do. But after the robbery Paula would belong to me.

Ike Abrams rattled off the highway in his '46 Ford, drove around to the back of the station, and parked beside the grease rack. I went around to meet him. “Can you take over now, Ike? I've got some things to do. We can check the cash register after a while.”

“Sure,” he said. “You sick or somethin', Joe? You look a little green around the rills.”

“I feel fine.”

I went to my cabin and didn't even notice the heat. I lay across the bed for several minutes without moving, without batting an eye, just staring at the ceiling and thinking of all the things I could do with one third of thirty thousand dollars. Ten thousand dollars, right in my pocket! It was more money than I'd ever had, more money than I'd ever seen, even, all at one time.

I must have dozed for a while. It was almost sundown when a knock at the door brought me out of it. I sat up, groggy with sleep and half dazed by the heat, and then I saw my father standing on the steps on the other side of the screen door.

“Son, you in there?”

“Sure, Dad. Come on in, if you can stand the heat.”

I was still sitting there scratching my head as he opened the screen and stepped inside. “By God,” I said, “I must have been crazy to go to sleep in this heat. I feel like I'd been knocked down with a wooden mallet. Sit down, Dad. I think there's some beer in the icebox.”

He looked older than the last time I had seen him, which had been only a day or two before, and very tired. He smiled faintly, dropped into a cane-bottomed chair, and carefully placed his black satchel on the floor.

“Yes. I think* a beer might taste good.”

I went to the kitchen and washed my face at the sink, then got the beers out of the icebox and brought them in. I dropped on the bed again and for one quiet moment we drank from the sweating cans. I was used to having my father drop in on me like this, every time he had a call out this way. He was the finest man I ever knew— and the only man in the world that I cared a damn about. We never said much. Usually it was just like this, sitting, drinking a beer together, and then he'd leave. I had a feeling, though, that today was going to be different.

“You been out to the Jarvis farm again?” I asked firmly.

He shrugged and smiled that small smile. “The McClellans, this time. The youngest boy stepped on a nail. Luckily, he had been vaccinated for tetanus.”

“Why,” I asked, “do you keep fooling with these hard-scrabble farmers, Dad? You'll never get your pay, and you know it. You could have a fine practice in town, be making plenty of money, if you'd stay in your office where people could find you.”

He glanced at me, then away. “People in the country need doctors too. Besides, it's a little late for me to start making money, isn't it?”

“You could think about your health. It's not too late for that, but it will be pretty soon, if you keep making these farm calls at all hours.”

We'd been over it a thousand times and had never found a meeting place. Maybe I would have been a doctor, the way he had wanted, if I could have seen any future in it when I was younger. But getting up at all hours of the night, when you're dead tired, and going out to the very end of God's nowhere to help some farmer's wife have her tenth kid was not my idea of a way to live.

“Joe ...” I looked up, almost forgetting that he was still sitting there. He cleared his throat and looked down at his lean, white hands. “Joe, I had a talk with Beth's father yesterday.”

“Steve Langford?” I knew what he was thinking. I didn't want to talk about it. It was the last thing I wanted to discuss right now, with Paula Sheldon whirling in my mind, but I couldn't think of any way to stop it. “What did Langford have to talk about—that front yard of his?” I laughed. “You'd think it was his life's work, the time he puts on it.”

“No.” He still looked at his hands. “He talked about you, Joe, and about Beth.”

“I know,” I said, trying hard to keep a hold on my anger. “Langford wants to know if Beth and I have set the date yet. Well, I've got news for Langford. There's not going to be any date. What a hell of a town this is! Go out with a girl a few times and they've got you as good as married!”

I had plenty more to say. I was getting damn tired of people like Steve Langford butting in on my business. But I left
them
 
unsaid, the things that were in my mind. I had no wish to hurt my father, the one man in the world that I liked. I guess he figured, like Langford, that someday I would marry a home-town girl and settle down to rot the rest of my life away in Creston. Well, he was mistaken about that; they all were mistaken.

But the look of disappointment in my father's eyes shook me. I suddenly realized how old he was, and tired, and finally I said: “I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll talk it over with Beth.”

He smiled, very faintly. “All right, Joe. Whatever you say.” Then he reached for his satchel and stood up. We said the usual small things, and after a while he was gone.

I was late, as usual, when I got around to the Langford place that night, and as usual Steve Langford was watering his front lawn as I drove up.

“You're late tonight, Joe.”

“Got held up at the station again,” I said.

He seemed distant, cool. He had been doing a lot of thinking and had just about decided that he didn't like me.

“Beth's in the house, I think.” He went on with his watering.

I sat in the car waiting for Beth to come out. Something made me look at Langford again. He was standing half crouched, rigid as a statue, with the squirting nozzle in his hands, almost as though it were a gun. I got it then. He was waiting for me to get out of the car, walk up to the front porch, and meet his daughter at the door.

Well, I thought, the hell with him! I tramped the horn button and the blaring sound hit the silent dusk like a hammer. Bright crimson rushed to Langford's face as he stood there. I tramped the horn again, just for the hell of it. By God, I thought, if she doesn't want to come out of the house, that's fine with me!

But she came out. I knew she was defying her father in doing it, but she came out.

“Are you ready?” I said.

“Sure, Joe.” Not looking at her father, she walked head down to the Chevy and got into the front seat beside me.

That was all we said until we were away from the house. She sat stiff and silent as I worked the Chevy toward the highway. She looked clean and crisp in a white dress, and her tanned arms and small face made her look almost like a young girl. But she certainly was no Paula Sheldon.

Well, I thought, I'm glad the end is in sight. And Beth knew it—it was written in the strained lines of her face. She was thirty years old, which is pretty old for a single girl in a town like Creston, and I could see it written in those lines of desperation at the corners of her mouth, in the steady glassiness of her eyes. There was just one thing I wished for: I wanted it to be calm and civilized. I had no wish to hurt her—all I wanted was to end it as cleanly as possible.

About three miles out of town we turned off the highway, onto a graveled road, and before long we could see the dark stand of oak and blackjack that more or less surrounded
Lake
Creston
. It was getting dark now and we began meeting cars heading back toward town, some of them towing small boats on two-wheeled trailers. Local fishermen.

Pretty soon we could see the lake itself, a pretty good-sized body of water for that part of the country, sprawling over maybe three hundred acres and held in check by a big dirt dam. I glanced at Beth, and she looked surprised. It had been a long time since I had brought her out here.

Maybe it was a mistake to come to this particular place, but it was the only place I could think of where we could talk and not be disturbed—where we could get mad and yell at each other, if it came to that, and not be afraid that somebody would hear us. I made a great business of watching the road as the lake rose up before us.

It was always something of a shock to see that much water in a dry country. The lake had been built back in the thirties by the WPA. It furnished Creston with water, and was well stocked for fishing, and a few years back picnic grounds had been constructed below the dam. There was a dock where several fishing boats, and even a few snipe-class sailboats, were tied up. Up toward the head of the dam there was a small blockhouse where you could buy fish bait, fishing licenses, and beer. I stopped and picked up a can of beer before crossing the dam. Now that the sun had set, the night was almost cool near the water.

“You want to take a turn around the lake?” I said.

She said something, I didn't hear what, as I circled the car to get under the wheel. “It's really quite a place,” I said. “I wouldn't mind having a cabin out here somewhere, a place where a guy could knock off for a day or so and just take it easy.”

I was just killing time, and Beth knew it. I could feel her staring at me, wondering what I was going to say.

There was a narrow, single-lane graveled road that meandered all the way around the lake, and now and then a deep-rutted spur that wandered off to a dead end at some abandoned farm. I put the car in gear and started across the dam, dunking vaguely that the cabin idea wasn't a bad one, at that. Maybe Paula and I would get ourselves one sometime. It would take some money, of course, but Old Man Provo and his box factory were going to furnish that.

After we hit the lake road we had to take it easy. It was dark, and the road crawled crazily in and out of wild-looking blackjack thickets, and you had to watch for cars parked here and there along the road. High-school kids.

About halfway around the lake I pulled my Chevy onto one of those abandoned farm roads and snapped out the lights. I looked at Beth, then lit a cigarette and sat back in the seat. There was tightness around her mouth, a determined look in her eyes.

“Joe.”

I looked at her.

“Joe, what's wrong? Something is wrong, isn't there? You've hardly said a word since we left the house.”

I didn't know how to say it. Goddamnit, I thought, I should have just called her on the telephone and told her it was all over. She moved over next to me, and I was the stiff one now, and cold.

“Joe...”

“Yes?”

“What is it, Joe? Can't you tell me?”

The situation was ridiculous, and being ridiculous made me mad. “Christ,” I said, “do I have to spell it out for you? We're not getting anywhere, that's all, and your old man thinks we ought to knock it off.” I looked straight ahead, through the windshield. “I think so, too.”

She did nothing for several seconds, sitting very erect, clenching her hands in her lap. Then, finally: “Joe, is it someone else? I know what my father thinks, and it isn't important, but is it someone else?”

“Now, who else would it be?” I said wearily. “If I'd found someone else, it would be all over Creston by now and you know it.”

“But... there must be a reason!”

“I told you,” I said. “We're not getting anywhere. And I'm tired of not getting anywhere, tired of Creston, tired of those lousy tourist shacks. I'm leaving this country, Beth, and everything in it. It's as simple as that.”

“Is it, Joe?”

“Now, what's that supposed to mean? Of course it's as simple as that. I'm sick of it and I'm leaving it.”

“And me, Joe?” A very tight voice. “What about me?”

Good Lord, I thought, what do you have to say to a woman like this?

I said, “It's over. If there was ever anything to begin with. That's what I'm trying to tell you. It's over.”

She didn't believe me. Womanlike, she couldn't believe that after all this time she was being dumped. Behind it all, she probably believed that my motivations were noble and gallant, because she couldn't make herself believe that I was simply sick of her and that was the whole story.

Then she did a hell of a thing. You had to know Beth to understand what a hell of a thing it was. Suddenly she had her arms around my neck and was pressing herself against me, and there was absolutely no mistake about what she had in her mind. This was her one big weapon—the one weapon that all
 
nice
 
girls like Beth hold onto to the bitter end, hoping that they'll never have to use it but firmly convinced that it will gain them their ends, a ring and marriage certificate, if the time should ever come.

It left me completely cold. Instantly, Paula was in my brain again, and nothing in the world that Beth could do could stir me. I reached for the switch and snapped it on.